Hot Topics:

Drew Weber has been in it for the long haul

By Chaz Scoggins, chaz@lowellsun.com

Updated:
01/20/2013 06:36:52 AM EST

In far too many minor-league cities, owners have come and gone nearly as fast as their teams. Lowell was no exception.

In the 29 seasons from 1887-1947 that Lowell fielded a minor-league baseball team, there were no fewer than 15 different principal owners, and nine of them lasted a year or less. Even during Lowell's first golden era of minor-league ball, 16 consecutive years with a team from 1901-1916, there were four different principal owners.

The longest anyone owned a team during that period was Andrew Roach, the proprietor of a local tavern who owned the old New England League's Lowell Grays for seven and a half years. When Roach folded the Grays after the 1916 season, he claimed that despite four winning seasons and two NEL pennants and a near-miss during his reign, his venture lost $20,000, and he couldn't sustain those losses anymore.

Now Lowell is enjoying an era even more golden, and despite just two New York-Penn League division titles and nine losing seasons in 17 years since the Spinners arrived in 1996 following nearly a half-century without minor-league baseball, the primary reason for their enduring success is their owner, Drew Weber.

Weber has owned the Spinners for the last 16 of those 17 years, and minor-league ball has thrived in Lowell like it never did before.

Advertisement

Unlike too many owners of minor-league teams, when Drew and his late wife, Joann, bought the club from Clyde Smoll their philosophy was you have to spend money to make money.

Under their ownership, the Spinners, along with the hugely popular Dayton Dragons, a Cincinnati Reds Class A club, became the first teams in the 120-year history of minor-league baseball to sell out an entire season in 2000. The Spinners went 11 consecutive calendar years without an unsold seat at 4,842-seat LeLacheur Park and early this season will pass three million in total attendance.

While they didn't invent the idea of providing a package of full family entertainment in addition to baseball, the Webers refined it. They made certain everyone had fun at a Spinners game, whether he was a toddler or a senior citizen. Although the Spinners are only tenants at LeLacheur, it's their responsibility to maintain the park, and 15 years later it still looks as marvelous as it did the day it opened in 1998.

"It would have been easy to save money here and there on things people wouldn't see," says Weber. "But that ballpark was a beauty in 1998, and the ballpark and the cleanliness of the ballpark has always been very, very important to us. A lot of people take it for granted, but we've put a ton of money into it, and we have a great, great staff that treats that ballpark like it's their child.

"We can't do anything about (the team) on the field. But we can take care of our office."

Most short-season baseball teams employ a skeleton staff during the winter months and then hire seasonal workers during the summer. But the Webers always maintained a full-time staff of around a dozen year round. It's a drain on finances when there is no revenue coming in. But a large part of the reason the Spinners have been so successful is because they work year round to make it happen.

"This is a very tough grind, and the pay is not great," Weber says. "So it's got to be fun, too. We work hard and we play hard.

"Don't get me wrong: This is a business, and I want to make money; I don't want to lose money. But I want it to be right. It has to be right."

Second thoughts

Yet 16 years later Weber admits he had second thoughts about buying the Spinners and worried about losing the fortune he had made in the clothing business in New York City.

It had originally been his intention, he said, to buy only 51% of the club from Smoll and his large ownership group. But when Smoll, who owned only 33% of the club, began squabbling with the rest of the minority owners, Weber realized he would have to buy the entire team.

"If I hadn't bought the whole team, it would have gone to litigation," he recalls.

The cost was $2.2 million for a team Smoll and his investors had paid $300,000 for 11 years earlier.

"I was scared for the whole next year," Weber relates. "My accountant told me I was nuts. I had no financials to go on. It was a big investment for me."

The biggest worry, he said, was about moving the team from the outskirts of Lowell, just off I-495, where the Spinners played in 1996-97 to the downtown location where the new ballpark was being built. A lot of people believed fans who had flocked to Alumni Field wouldn't go deep into the city to see a baseball game.

"I had people tell me: 'Don't do it! The park is right here on 495. You don't want to go there. This is a much better location,'" Weber says.

"I laugh about it now. But back then I was thinking maybe I hadn't made such a great deal. Put all that together, and that can scare you."

It turned out the Webers had the right business plan and they never had anything to worry about. They mingled with and listened to the fans. Joann served as a surrogate mother to many of the ballplayers, especially those first-year pros who were a long way from home for the first times in their lives, until she passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2006.

"She was a very special lady, and it amazes me how many people still come up to me seven years later and talk about her to me," Weber says. "Obviously that has been a big loss for me."

Biggest satisfaction

The one thing the Webers could never control was the team itself. The Spinners played with the players the Red Sox gave them, and Drew yearned for a championship team. He finally got two, in 2008 and 2009.

"Years ago it was frustrating because (the Red Sox) just weren't signing guys. But the new Red Sox group got it all together in terms of drafting and bringing terrific talent into LeLacheur Park," he said.

Asked what his biggest satisfaction from owning the Spinners has been, Weber is sheepishly candid.

"Before I came here, Lowell was a city I'd honestly never heard of, and I'm embarrassed to say that, because everyone I know in New York and New Jersey knows Lowell because of its textile history. I don't know how I missed it, but I did. So I came to a city I'd never heard of until 15 years ago, and today I can walk down the street and know more people than I've known in every town I've ever lived in before. And that makes me feel good."

Weber has no intentions of selling the Spinners anytime soon, and, if possible, he'd like his son, Michael, and daughter, Kate to inherit the club.

"I love the baseball part, seeing the kids on the field, the whole idea of Lowell Spinners baseball," he muses. "What makes this place so fun is the energy.

"I just can't imagine what it would be like to be inside a half-full ballpark."

Welcome to your discussion forum: Sign in with a Disqus account or your social networking account for your comment to be posted immediately, provided it meets the guidelines. (READ HOW.)
Comments made here are the sole responsibility of the person posting them; these comments do not reflect the opinion of The Sun. So keep it civil.